Who I am

Ramy al-Asheq was born a Palestinian refugee and lived in Syria and Jordan. He arrived in Germany in 2014. Here, the author and journalist writes about that new beginning in life.

I don’t really like writing about myself because I’m always worried someone could consider it narcissistic or boastful. However, as I now want to blog here regularly and you will be reading my name more frequently, I simply wanted to say briefly who I am.

It doesn’t matter where you come from

My name is Ramy al-Asheq. If the topic of Syria was not so close to my heart I would not bother mentioning where I come from. I don’t tend to ask other people where they come from, because it makes no difference to my relationship to them. When it comes to other things, however, I ask very closely, for example as regards mourning, death, language, or love, the cold that surrounds me this very moment, or why they sell such bad coffee on the trains here.

I was born a refugee and lived in Syria as a refugee. I then fled onward, first to Jordan, and then to Germany, and was then declared an “illegal immigrant” or “stateless person”. I came to Germany at the invitation of the Heinrich-Böll-Haus in order to write here. Since 2011 I have also been working for Arab newspapers. Back in Syria and Jordan I was active as a journalist, and reported on the Syrian uprising. In Germany I have to date written for the “taz”, “Fluter” and other media. I also founded an Arab newspaper here, Abwab, and was its publisher for two years. At the moment I am busy preparing the launch of an Arab-German cultural magazine called Fann.

Continuing to write with a German poet

I am also a poet and author. I have published two volumes of poetry and one of prose in Arabic. My texts have been translated into German, English and Bosnian, among others. I am represented in the German-language anthology “Weg sein hier sein” brought out in 2016 by Secession Verlag and have published on the “weiterschreiben.jetzt” Website. As part of the “Weiter Schreiben” project, the poet Monika Rinck has translated my poems into German and I hers into Arabic. I regularly give readings at literary events in German cities.

That probably all sounds pretty boring, but that’s simply the way it is if I write about myself. I hope that with my future texts I can spark some interesting debates, more interesting ones than with this text.